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I've never been bitten by the PopCap bug. You know what I'm talking about: Bejeweled. Bookworm. Peggle. The publisher's library of simple puzzle games that start off as casual distractions, and quickly wind up taking over your life. Sure, I played them...but I had no trouble putting them down. But none of that matters anymore, because PopCap's newest runaway hit managed to chew right through my formidable defenses and make me one of them.

The sheer absurdity of Plants vs. Zombies' premise is a large part of the game's charm. The zombie apocalypse is here, and a legion of cartoon-cute corpses lumber across your lawn (across multiple horizontal lanes, arranged in a tidy grid) for a little cerebellum snack. Your weapons of choice: an arsenal of equally adorable flora, armed with spores, seeds, melons, and other organic undead-deterrents. Build a solid defense and keep a few waves of undead out of your house, and you live to garden another day. Slip up, and you're a light afternoon lunch. Put simply, it's a tower defense game -- a darn good one.

And a tricky one, too. You eventually unlock dozens of plants (along with other passive defenses and upgrades), but with a limited number of slots, you must carefully tailor your loadout to the siege at hand (the game helps out by giving you a handy preview of the incoming opposition prior to each level's start). While simple pea shooters and wall-nuts (burly barriers that stop interlopers in their tracks for a good long while) cut it early on, you'll want to break out the threepeaters (which shoot projectiles that cover a trio of horizontal rows) and cat-tails (they look just like they sound) for the backyard levels. And by the time you reach the roof, you'll be knocking decomposed heads clean off with kernel-pults, staving off relentless hordes of the cute cadavers (ranging from no-frills lumbering slowpokes, to gimmicky ghouls that pogo-hop over your defenses, snorkel across your pool, and even -- in a homage to Michael Jackson's Thriller -- moonwalk the night away alongside a cadre of backup dancers). You might roll your eyes at the first few easy levels, but it eventually becomes a frantic exercise in plate-spinning. When you beat a level, you almost always feel like you really earned it. Those happy sunflowers and drooling dead-dudes may look like cuddly cartoon creations, but, by the later stages, things definitely escalate to tense, all-out war.

Dozens of minigames supplement the main adventure mode, and pose numerous oddball challenges. In one, you might break a bunch of jars and deal with the ensuing threats (using only what's provided for you), while in another, you place the zombies, in an effort to kill all the plants on the map. And by the time you've conquered all the challenges, run through the adventure mode two or three times, purchased all the items from the in-game store, and cultivated a Zen garden filled with money-producing plants, you'll discard all notions of this being a casual game. Underneath its cutesy veneer Plants vs. Zombies is hardcore. Well done, PopCap. Well done.